Nirvanix will switch off on September 30; UK partner looks for rescue plan.

San Diego-based cloud storage provider Nirvanix has given its customers two weeks' notice to get anything they want to keep out of the company's cloud. According to a report by Information Age, Nirvanex executives told employees of the enterprise cloud storage company yesterday to warn customers that the service will be unplugged on September 30. Meanwhile, the company's UK-based partner, Aorta Cloud, is trying to rescue the service—or at least pick up some of its customers' data as Nirvanix vaporizes.

Nirvanix had previously raised $70 million in funding from investors, but the company's executives have reportedly told employees that Nirvanix has "gone to the wall" with that money. Steve Ampleford, the CEO of Aorta Cloud, told Information Age's Pete Swabey that he is seeking a new round of funding for Nirvanix. The company holds a number of patents around managing storage in the petabyte range, and Ampleford said he is trying to get customers interested in continuing their Nirvanix service to contact Aorta.

This wouldn't be the first time Nirvanix left users' data in the lurch. The company took over hosting the cloud storage service, The Linkup, in 2008. When MediaMax, the company behind The Linkup, went under in the midst of the migration, the company told users to download their data or it would be deleted; some of the migration was completed, but many users lost access to their data.

Multiple petabytes eh? You need a minimum of 900kbps to transfer 1 petabyte over a 2 week period. Depending how many petabytes they have, it might not even be possible for people to get their data in time. Pretty weak.

Multiple petabytes eh? You need a minimum of 900kbps to transfer 1 petabyte over a 2 week period. Depending how many petabytes they have, it might not even be possible for people to get their data in time. Pretty weak.

Multiple petabytes eh? You need a minimum of 900kbps to transfer 1 petabyte over a 2 week period. Depending how many petabytes they have, it might not even be possible for people to get their data in time. Pretty weak.

Confidence in the cloud drops with each one of these incidents.

Good thing finding a .9 mbps connection is pretty simple. Using your math I can download over 50 petabytes in two weeks with my 50/10 cable connection.

Yet another reason why I have yet to put all of my faith in a cloud provider. I live in an area with pretty weak bandwidth which really reinforces why I'm weary of the cloud.

Doesn't matter. I have FIOS 150Mbps and I'm still getting 330kB/s on a backup download from a well-connected provider with gobs of bandwidth. That's an ETA of 1000 hours for well under 2TB. Not PB, TB. I almost feel like they're throttling it.

Yet another reason why I have yet to put all of my faith in a cloud provider. I live in an area with pretty weak bandwidth which really reinforces why I'm weary of the cloud.

Doesn't matter. I have FIOS 150Mbps and I'm still getting 330kB/s on a backup download from a well-connected provider with gobs of bandwidth. That's an ETA of 1000 hours for well under 2TB. Not PB, TB. I almost feel like they're throttling it.

That's actually a very good point. If ALL of their customers are in the process of pulling their data out of Nirvanix's cloud storage, it's fairly likely that there is going to be a fair amount of congestion on Nirvanix's internet links. That could make retrieving your data within two weeks nigh impossible.

Even if you have good broadband speeds, it would suck if you have bandwidth caps and can only move like 250GBs (assuming no other traffic, not likely) before you get penalized. My monthly caps are a big reason I never bothered to backup online--looking at Carbonite and the like--but figured it'd take too long to migrate multiple TBs of data in monthly chunks of 250GB (minus my normal usage for that month).

Stories like this one are exactly why I've been on and off about cloud storage. I do use some cloud storage services, like iTunes Match -- but I also keep local copies of everything that actually matters to me. More and more, I'm also favoring local "cloud" storage services. That is to say, I use Tonido to access my own home computer through the cloud directly, so that even if the company goes south, the only thing I'll actually lose is their redirection service; all of my data is still safely ensconced on my hard drive at home.

and this is among the many reasons why I have multiple terabytes of storage capacity locally.

Exactamundo. 10TB of FreeNas's ZFS storage here for everything I need. Sadly, I'm running out and the next one is probably going to be a 4TBx6 modeled the same way. Rock solid, always with me, always available.

and this is among the many reasons why I have multiple terabytes of storage capacity locally.

Yeah you can say that again.

I do not trust any host especially after the whole Mega fiasco which showed me that any host can be destroyed overnight by the government who's bending over backwards to service scumbags like the MPAA / RIAA.. They most likely upload all their content themselves just to extort people. No way in hell Prenda could be the only ones doing it.DVD - $20Extortion - $2,000 at a minimum.

Stories like this one are exactly why I've been on and off about cloud storage. I do use some cloud storage services, like iTunes Match -- but I also keep local copies of everything that actually matters to me. More and more, I'm also favoring local "cloud" storage services. That is to say, I use Tonido to access my own home computer through the cloud directly, so that even if the company goes south, the only thing I'll actually lose is their redirection service; all of my data is still safely ensconced on my hard drive at home.

And keep any really important data in off-site hard copies as well. Having your own home server might not be enough if your home was in say, Boulder, Colorado at the moment.

Stories like this one are exactly why I've been on and off about cloud storage. I do use some cloud storage services, like iTunes Match -- but I also keep local copies of everything that actually matters to me. More and more, I'm also favoring local "cloud" storage services. That is to say, I use Tonido to access my own home computer through the cloud directly, so that even if the company goes south, the only thing I'll actually lose is their redirection service; all of my data is still safely ensconced on my hard drive at home.

And keep any really important data in off-site hard copies as well. Having your own home server might not be enough if your home was in say, Boulder, Colorado at the moment.

Most people would be off-site backuping up at a nearby friends house, which also probably would have been in or near Boulder

Really there is no way to prevent some disasters, but of course a friends house covers the most basic and common of them (ie: fire, theft, oh shiiiit moments)

and this is among the many reasons why I have multiple terabytes of storage capacity locally.

And if your local storage fails? Or your site fails?

There's nothing really wrong with cloud hosting, provided you do it sensibly. I'd much rather pay a colo or hosting facility an operating expense than build my own datacentre with the same levels of service.

What you do not do is put all your eggs in one basket, local or cloud.

... What you do not do is put all your eggs in one basket, local or cloud.

Both of you are correct; best practices in backup procedures are to maintain duplicate copies of your data, in multiple geographic locations. However, I think it's worth pointing out that not all data is created equal.

Like a couple of others in this thread, I have multiple terabytes of local storage spread between multiple computers, at home. I also have Time Machine backup drives attached to my local network for backing up those computers, and I make use of several different off-site cloud storage solutions. However, I do not backup all of my data to the cloud, not by a long shot. In fact, some of my data is never backed up at all, as it just isn't important enough to me, to go through the trouble. I'm actually perfectly okay with losing that data, in the event of a catastrophe. Inversely, my personal data is not nearly as important in the grand scheme of things as (for example) a corporation's financial data; using best practices to backup that data is an absolute business requirement, for which failure could actually get someone fired!

So are backups important? Absolutely. But as with all things which are important, you need to do a simple cost-benefit analysis, before going nuts.

If this soon-to-be defunct company is the only place your data exists, your data doesn't exist and never really did.

If this soon-to-be defunct company is providing mission-critical services and you don't have a contingency for this (incredibly obvious) eventuality, I'm sorry......but you're an idiot.

Harsh, but true. As long as you're satisfied with your RPO/RTO policy and that you can meet it in the event of total cloud data loss, there's nothing wrong with utilizing cloud resources pretty much irrespective of their reliability. If you can't get that RPO/RTO to where you need it for your cloud data then don't use cloud services. If you don't have any RPO/RTO policy for cloud stuff then you shouldn't even be thinking about using the cloud, let alone actually putting real data there. And if you don't know what RPO and RTO mean then, well, none of this likely concerns you anyway.

Sean Gallagher / Sean is Ars Technica's IT Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.